We all know that Microsoft is working towards making the company’s next operating system as fast as possible. In recent videos and demonstrations, we saw just how fast Windows 8 can be. But is it really that fast or is Microsoft just yanking our chains? Lets find out.
The guys over at LifeHacker put together a speed test between Windows 7 and Windows 8 (Dev Preview). Their speed test was based on user experience, rather than synthetic benchmarks. “All tests were performed on a clean installation of the OS, with the same programs installed. Overall, we found both to be pretty similar in performance, with a few exceptions.”
The hardware used to run this test was an overclocked 3.8GHz Core i7 machine with 6GB Ram, 2TB HD, Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT, and a Ethernet 20mbps.
“Really, though, most of the scores were close enough that you wouldn’t necessarily notice it in your day-to-day work, unless maybe you were on a low-powered machine, where the differences would be greater. Either way, it’s nice to know that there definitely aren’t any speed decreases in Windows 8.”
One big win for Windows 8 is its boot time. We all know the Windows 8 boot time is amazing but according to LifeHacker, the boot time feels unpredictable. In other words, Windows 8 will boot fast and other times it will boot slow. Perhaps this is something that will be fixed before Windows 8 hits manufacturing sometime next year.
Windows 8 is designed to boot faster thanks to the less work done by resuming from a hibernated system session compared to a full system session. You can read more about the new boot features here.
The bottom line? Windows 8 may be slightly faster than Windows 7 in areas such as duplicating, compressing, and uncompressing files, but it is only a mere second difference. Launching an application was said to take the same amount of time in Windows 8 compared to Windows 7. We can all chalk this up to the fact that Windows 8 is still in a developer’s preview stage and is expected to only get better over time. Lets hope anyway.
The video below demonstrates the side-by-side test of which operating system boots faster:
